A BRIDE-TO-BE discovered her fiance dead from alcohol poisoning after his stag night - just six days before they were due to marry.

Invitations to the wedding were cancelled and instead arrangements for Graham Pearce's funeral were sent out.

At the funeral his intended bride Joyce Savage wore her wedding gown and her bridesmaids their dresses as a tribute to him.

The couple's wedding cake was cut at the wake and Mrs Savage took photos of herself in her wedding dress to put in her fiance's coffin.

Mrs Savage spoke this week after a coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death on Mr Pearce, a warehouse worker at Tibbett & Brittain, Allington, Maidstone.

Mr Pearce, 48, had been on his stag night with a group of friends in Chatham on Saturday, January 25. The inquest heard he had drunk the equivalent of 16 pints in less than four hours.

He was drinking pints, then shorts. Home Office pathologist Dr David Rouse said Mr Pearce's death was due to acute alcohol intoxication.

He stopped drinking some time before closing time but become groggy and appeared to have fallen asleep.

At closing time he was taken outside and laid on a bench, before his friends took him back to the couple's home.

Mrs Savage put him in the recovery position on the living room floor and could hear him snoring but she checked on him at 4am and he had stopped breathing.

She said: "When I discovered him I was hyper-ventilating. The paramedics came and they had machines put on him and I said 'it's no good, he's dead.'"

The couple met through a dating agency in 1995. By April 1997, he had proposed but they had had to postpone their wedding several times because of family deaths.

Mrs Savage, who lived with Mr Pearce in Thomson Close, Snodland, near Rochester, said: "I was really looking forward to my wedding because we'd had such a horrible year."